Cusco, Peru

I´m on hour 6 of my 12 hour layover in Lima on my way to Santiago, so I figure now is a good time to add a new post. I just spent about the past week and a half in Cusco, a colonial town in the mountains close to Machu Picchu. The town has a very colonial feel to it, and most tourists stay close to the main square called Plaza de Armas. The plaza features a fountain in the center with two large cathedrals, and lots of restaurants and nightlife in the surrounding streets. I spent the first few nights there enjoying the city and going out at night.









However, the main reason I came to Cusco was to see Machu Picchu. I decided on doing a 4 day jungle trek along one of the older Inca trails to get there. However, due to the horrible wet season the path to get there was destroyed in a lot of places, and because the guides hadn't walked the trail for about 4 months since the closure, much of the time they were trying to figure out the way to go as we went. For example, a lot of the time we had to cross landslides that had taken out the road or paths:





At one point, we a landslide had taken out the road the night before and was still mildly active, so we had to run accross it one-by-one when the construction crews said it was ok to avoid being hit by falling rocks. At a few other points in the trip, the river had gotten so high that it had taken out a lot of the bridges, so we had to cross it on basically a steel rope with a cable car attached to it:





On the second one, we were probably about 100 feet high above the river. It was a bit sketchy, but alright.

Despite all that, the views from the trail were pretty amazing.





And of course, Machu Picchu was well worth the wait:











At the end there was a bit of a fiasco with everyone getting their train tickets at the end (I somehow got two, some people got none, some had names misspelled, etc), but for the most part everything worked out. It was definitely one of my favorite things that I have done so far.